Andreas Brockhaus updated the committee on work done by the Learning Technologies team since the last meeting to notify faculty and students about the upcoming migration to Canvas.Faculty have received email, newsletters, and postcards with information about the migration.Students have been notified via Blackboard.Talwinder Singh offered to send email to all students through ASUWB.Andreas will follow up with him on that.

Data Center Strategy

Tim Rhoades presented a proposed strategy for UW Bothell data center needs.The existing data center is insufficient, and this strategy suggests alternatives to maintaining a local data center.In determining these alternatives, Tim’s team identified the following guiding principles:

-Conform to all applicable regulations, policies, and laws

-Ensure that faculty, staff, and students can still do what they need to do

-Retain ability to recover and retrieve data

-Provide services at lowest possible cost

Alternatives to a local data center location:

oUW Seattle’s data center, where services are still managed by us

oUW Seattle, where Seattle IT would manage the services for us

oOutsource server location to a cloud vendor, where services are still managed by us

oOutsource services to a cloud vendor, where the vendor manages the service for us

To determine which strategy is appropriate for any given service, Tim suggested this checklist:

oIs the service critical to UW Bothell?If not, sunset it.

oDoes UW Seattle provide a similar service we could use at low cost?

oDoes an outsourced service option exist?

oIs it possible to house the servers outside of our data center, while we still run the service?

oDo we need to develop and run something locally in our data center?

Tim described these challenges to the kind of change he is proposing:

-Change is disruptive

-It’s not possible to go back once a change is made

-Loss of control of how services are delivered

-Contracts and vendor relationships become very important

This strategy offers these benefits:

-Increased capacity to support research locally

-IT staff time could be diverted from technical support to more direct support for instruction and research

-Better scalability for important services like email and file management

-Better options for business continuity

The committee agreed that this is important work. They pointed out that it will be important for IT to communicate broadly and frequently with the campus as changes are made in order to create smooth transitions.

Technology Budgets

Betsy Tippens handed out a list of proposals that IT is considering for submission in the budget process.The committee did not have time to discuss the list, and Betsy asked that committee members review the information on their and send feedback or suggestions to her individually.

Upcoming Agenda Items

Given the lack of time at the meeting, the committee will determine upcoming agenda items over email.